You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The author traces the romance of Julian Bell and Shuhua Ling, placing Ling, known as a Chinese Katherine Mansfield, squarely in the Bloomsbury constellation. But she encounters East-West polarities and suggests forms of understanding to inaugurate a new kind of cultural criticism.
This is a study of Virginia Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with silence and the barrier between the sayable and the unsayable. Using a wide range of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Kristeva and Derrida, Laurence demonstrates convincingly that Woolf was the first modern woman novelist to practice silence in her writing and that, in so doing, she created a new language of the mind and changed the metaphor of silence from one of absence or oppression to one of presence and strength. It suggests new directions for Woolf criticism.
Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life reinvents Bowen as a public intellectual, propagandist, spy, cultural ambassador, journalist, and essayist as well as a writer of fiction. Patricia Laurence counters the popular image of Bowen as a mannered, reserved Anglo-Irish writer and presents her as a bold, independent woman who took risks and made her own rules in life and writing. This biography distinguishes itself from others in the depth of research into the life experiences that fueled Bowen’s writing: her espionage for the British Ministry of Information in neutral Ireland, 1940-1941, and the devoted circle of friends, lovers, intellectuals and writers whom she valued: Isaiah Berlin, William Pl...
A Thousand Miles of Dreams is an evocative and intimate biography of two Chinese sisters who took very different paths in their quests to be independent women. Ling Shuhao arrived in Cleveland in 1925 to study medicine in the middle of a U.S. crackdown on Chinese immigrant communities, and her effort to assimilate began. She became an American named Amy, while her sister Ling Shuhua burst onto the Beijing literary scene as a writer of short fiction. Shuhua's tumultuous affair with Virginia Woolf's nephew during his years in China eventually drew her into the orbit of the Bloomsbury group. The sisters were Chinese "modern girls" who sought to forge their own way in an era of social revolution...
Jonathan Laurence has been displaced from his job by a corporate merger and is down to his last few thousand dollars, when a violent, chance encounter places him in the company of Curtis and Don Ed, two unsuccessful criminals. In a desperate measure to maintain his social status, Jonathan and his new associates plan a robbery which goes very badly wrong. In the aftermath Jonathan takes off for St. Martin with Don Ed's topless dancer girlfriend, Tiffany. When a valuable treasure is discovered missing, Jonathan and Tiffany are pursued in the Caribbean by a cast of dangerous and unsavory characters. This is a hilarious adventure with colorful but likable characters who can't seem to get anything right.
Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life reinvents Bowen as a public intellectual, propagandist, spy, cultural ambassador, journalist, and essayist as well as a writer of fiction. Patricia Laurence counters the popular image of Bowen as a mannered, reserved Anglo-Irish writer and presents her as a bold, independent woman who took risks and made her own rules in life and writing. This biography distinguishes itself from others in the depth of research into the life experiences that fueled Bowen’s writing: her espionage for the British Ministry of Information in neutral Ireland, 1940-1941, and the devoted circle of friends, lovers, intellectuals and writers whom she valued: Isaiah Berlin, William Pl...
This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influent...
Addresses such themes as the creation of worlds through literary writing, Woolf’s reception as a world writer, world wars and the centenary of the First World War, and natural worlds in Woolf’s writings.
Translated fiction has largely been under-theorized, if not altogether ignored, in literary studies. Though widely consumed, translated novels are still considered secondary versions of foreign masterpieces. Readers, Reading and Reception of Translated Fiction in Chinese recognizes that translated novels are distinct from non-translated novels, just as they are distinct from the originals from which they are derived, but they are neither secondary nor inferior. They provide different models of reality; they are split apart by two languages, two cultures and two literary systems; and they are characterized by cultural hybridity, double voicing and multiple intertextualities. With the continue...
"Struggling for Wings" is a diverse collection of reviews, interviews, and essays on the controversial career of James Dickey, a writer whose work has engendered commentary ranging from high praise to scathing personal attack. Never before collected, the materials in this volume record America's critical response to Dickey, beginning in the early 1960s when he first began publishing poetry and continuing through the mid-1990s, with comprehensive overviews of Dickey's entire canon.